Why Rob Smith Can NOT be Secretary of State Part 1

Rob Smith is a joke, I don’t know why I waste my time writing about a guy who votedAGAINST making sure that people with disabilities are allowed to vote, AGAINST making sure that our military who is fighting overseas could have their absentee ballots counted and also OPPOSED cleaning deceased voters from Mississippi’s rolls.

Truthfully I am nervous that Hosemann may be too nice to go negative and expose this Joker for who he really is. So until he does I guess I just have to keep Blogging about my lack of respect for Rob Smith.

Listen up folks we have a race with a CONTRAST and it is the issue of Voter ID.

Hosemann vs. Smith has been a yawner of a race, since Smith hardly seems legitimate, it is however a race worth noting because the candidates have actually drawn a line in the sand over multiple issues, chief among them being voter ID. Hosemann (and anyone with half a brain) supports a voter ID to reduce election fraud, amazingly Rob Smith is violently against voter identification and I cant seem to understand why.

HERE IS PROOF OF CONTRAST!!! RARE IN POLITICS TODAY!!!

Rob Smith: “Voter ID and re-registration by party will cause major disruption in elections. He said the Voter ID requirement will stop people from voting. He also said the timing, in an election year for president, is horrible. He said he is most concerned about elderly people trying to vote next year.” Laurel Leader Call October 7th 2007

Delbert Hosemann:“said he is finding little public opposition to Voter ID, and reminds people that 97 percent of voters have a driver’s license. He said the other three percent should be able to use other forms of identification, but the state must be careful to not leave anyone out of elections. “If there’s one vote out there without ID, we need to find them,” Hosemann said. Biloxi Sun Herald, October 4th 2007

Rob Smith: Many older black Mississippians say providing voter identification is a reminder of the civil rights era when the state used techniques such as poll taxes to keep blacks from voting. Hattiesburg American Sept 19th 2007

Delbert Hosemann:Considering 97 percent of voters already have a driver’s license or other picture identification in their wallets when they go to vote, Delbert Hosemann, a Republican candidate for secretary of state, believes implementing a program requiring voter identification is only natural. Columbus Dispatch October 2, 2007

Delbert Hosemann: “I will lead a fight to pass a constitutional voter ID program, which will ensure that only citizens are allowed to vote” Laurel Leader Call September 29th 2007

So there you go, a little old fashioned DIFFERENCE between 2 candidates.

Every single one of my left wing friends and yellow dog friends strongly support voter ID. Rob Smith is obviously out of touch with the needs of Mississippi Citizens. Voter ID standards were set out in HAVA in 2002 and passed the supreme court. Everyone knows that Voter ID is common sense, the way Mississippi elections are run now, anyone who knows your name and address can go vote in your place.

Even the public perception that voter fraud is rampant is reason enough to install safeguards to stop it. People need to be empowered to vote not discouraged that their vote does not count or could easily be stolen.

Rob Smith a very scary kind of candidate, he is so wrong and so backwards on so many issues that he makes me scratch my head in disbelief.

7 Comments on “Why Rob Smith Can NOT be Secretary of State Part 1”

Yes KingMaker, he has an audio clip that says “I dont want to say anything about that position because I dont want it to wind up on the front page of the paper and stop me from being elected Secretary of State” I am serious. That quote may be the basis for Part 2.

OK, I had no beef with Smith until I read THIS in the Mississippi Business Journal:

“Smith also proposes improvement to the state’s voting system. If elected, he intends to bring together circuit clerks and representatives of local election commissions to come up with a plan to better conduct elections.
“Everyone wants to encourage voting,” Smith said. “But there is discomfort with voting machines and other issues out there that circuit clerks and election commissioners are concerned with. The circuit clerks and election commissioners are the backbone of elections in Mississippi. There are the people who have to get up at 4 a.m. in morning and are not home until midnight on the day of elections. They have the understanding and also have the solutions. For some reason, state leaders forget local elected officials have a better grasp of how processes could be improved. It
is a priority with me to make sure circuit clerks and election commissioners are in a partnership with the secretary of state to improve elections in Mississippi.”

The problem with that is the fact that going back to 82 different election administrators in the state is PRECISELY the kind of thing that the federal election reform was trying to prevent. The reason the “Bush v. Gore” decision came down in 2000 was the question of equal protection. When different districts in one state have different systems and performance levels, you end up with a violation of the equal protection clause.

If Smith had READ the Help America Vote Act (the federal act that also dealt with those other issues he apparently opposes — disability access to voting, military and overseas voting, etc.) he would understand it. He would also understand that if he is elected SOS, it is HIS BUTT that the Feds will drag into court, not those clerks and commissioners he seems now beholden to.

82 people (or in the case of commissioners, 410 people) cannot be in charge of elections in a state anymore, there has to be one person and one office. THAT’S the reason the clerks are so mad at Eric Clark. He recognized that the best way to keep from getting sued by the Feds (a case he would lose, by the way) was to get AHEAD of the curve on election reform. And he did. Mississippi actually has a pretty good reputation among SOS across the state, because it has done such a good job complying with HAVA.

So Smith is going to roll back those reforms? Makes me sick. Is he going to personally bring back the lever machines and punch card machines, which are now against the law (no second-chance voting, not accessible)? Good luck with that — election vendors don’t even service them any more. And he’ll have a ton of fun on future Election Days — because it doesn’t matter if he hands the keys to the kingdom to the clerks and commissioners, when a county screws something up (and boy, do they ever do that) the media and citizens will be calling HIS office, not his old buddy the clerk. And he will get to tell them how impotent he has made that office in the matter of elections.

Yes Jacksonian I eluded to HAVA in my original post but I got carried away and did not make it more clear. Smith is an advocate of taking Mississippi voting back to the caveman days where we could all walk up and scratch our mark on the side of a cliff. Or maybe a better option for Rob Smith might be “Heads down Hands up” like we used to vote in emementary school. He has no plan for bringing MS up to code with the ADA and has even been on record saying we should have both electronic and paper ballots for the voter to choose between.

Both electronic and paper ballots? Good grief. The poor pollworkers (bless their hearts) have enough trouble understanding how to manage an election with ONE type of ballot, can you imagine two? How will the two tabulations work together? Don’t ask the commissioners to do it, math ain’t their thing.

You want a laugh — albeit a scary one? Look at the election results on the SOS web site — http://www.sos.state.ms.us/elections/EleResults/select_election.asp — and take a look at the results for the 2001 Flag Election from Yazoo county. Look at the county totals. Then see if you get the same results by adding up the precinct numbers.

THOSE results were certified by the very people Smith wants to owe his career to. Smart. Oh, and when they come in wrong like that, the SOS (no matter who it is) can’t do anything to change it, the commissioners would have to go to court and get an order to submit corrected results.

Someone with some time on their hands (ain’t me) should look through all the results from 2000, the Flag Election, 2002, and 2003 and see how many math errors their are.